At 7:05, some bad weather was expected — certainly it turned out not to be CC Sabathia’s usual cutter on the hands of Franklin Gutierrez, who burned him for a home run — so it was decided to delay the start time 36 minutes for showers that never materialized.

It was drier than a Pirates’ postseason drought and the Yankees still wouldn’t start the contest. Perhaps they knew something about the inevitability of their first loss in eight games, 8-4 to the Mariners at the Stadium, because the Yankees proceeded to play a terrible game all the way through Hideki Matsui, Melky Cabrera and Jorge Posada consecutively stranding two runners in the ninth.

That was the most exciting part for the fans, too. Despite their pride, or faux pride, as the game’s most intense rooters, they busied themselves with a seventh-inning wave while the game drizzled away. It never rained, but despite three hits by Robinson Cano and a homer and double by Matsui, the evening poured lethargy.

Sabathia, taking the ball for a staff that had pitched to a 2.52 ERA and .206 opposition batting average in the previous 15 games, simply didn’t have it. Both the stuff that had enabled him to go at least seven innings in nine of his previous 11 starts, and the kind of defensive support that might have bailed him out on a bad night were missing.

Mark Teixeira, heretofore a picking machine at first base, got fooled by the velocity of Ichiro’s first-inning line drive and let the ball go through his glove, helping Seattle to get up 1-0. In the fifth, Teixeira did a matador dance on Ryan Langerhans’ sixth-inning smash.

To complete the hat trick, the first baseman threw wide of Alfredo Aceves on Ichiro’s ninth-inning grounder, committing his first official error in 106 games, though really his third of the night.

Teixeira said the first two balls were on him fast, and that on the third he had to rid himself of the ball almost as fast, with Ichiro running. Manager Joe Girardi backed his player, but didn’t exactly say the Yankees, those errorless wonders earlier this season for a major-league record 18 games, performed crisply.

“When you are playing so well and doing so many things right, you are surprised to see things don’t go right,” Girardi said.

The Yankees might still have survived a hitless game by Alex Rodriguez and homers by Gutierrez and Branyan had Cabrera not broken in on Ichiro’s two-out fly ball that dropped on the warning track to complete the game-turning three-run fourth inning. But to say that Sabathia could have gotten better support does not mean he earned it.

“He was between 95 and 97 all night, had the best fastball he had all season, just couldn’t get the ball down,” Girardi said.

Sabathia also seemed reluctant to throw said ball all the way up until he walked Branyan, the hefty lefty’s final batter, to load the bases in the sixth. The six runs he gave up were his most in 12 starts, the 10 hits a season high.

His velocity wouldn’t suggest that the biceps tendinitis that forced Sabathia from a June 21 start in Florida (apparently related to his 123-pitch effort in Boston two starts earlier) is a lingering problem, particularly off a commanding win against the Mets last weekend.

But he certainly pitched poorly last night in front of a team that matched his efforts behind him.